As always, we like to discuss some handy features of our wonderful Real Time Price Engine, such as the ability to search for product SKU’s like “ADA3000DAA4BP”. This makes searching for an exact product a breeze. You can also try searching for product categories like “AMD CPU”. Another exceptional feature is the ability to ignore certain words from your search results. To do this, you would add the “-“ (minus) sign and the word. For example, if I were searching for all Pentium CPUs except the Pentium D, I would enter: “Intel Pentium –D”.

In this week’s CPU price guide, we found that the AMD Athlon Dual Core processors dropped prices in recent times. The X2 3800+ has remained unchanged for the most part and is still considered the “best bang for the buck”. We also noticed a recent price drop with the AMD 3800+ and 4000+ Venice cores, which could be due to the increase in demand for the dual core processors.

AMD’s Opteron line has remained mostly unchanged except for a few outrageous price jumps that we noticed. And the Xeon processors have remained practically the same since our last price guide, something we eagerly want to know why that is.

Also, the Intel 500, 600 and 800 series have also remained quite stable with the 500 and 600 series being just about equal in performance.

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38 Comments

Did anyone else notice that the AMD Sempron 64 (754) 3000+ 128KB Palermo on the RTPE is at Chumbo for 74.99. The only problem with that is it links to a 2600+ chip instead. The 3000+ chip is $99. Reply

Is there any word at all about when we might see Socket 939 Semprons available for retail?

Together with something like the Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9 motherboard (GeForce 6100/430 based board with SATA/300/RAID, Gigabit LAN, integrated graphics, PCI-E, and quiet, passive cooling, for $79 on newegg.com), the Socket 939 Sempron would make a killer office combo (or home entertainment); cheap, decent performance, and very upgradeable (can take dual core Athlon).

With AMD stating that there will be no more OEM chips made available, I'm doubtful that we'll ever see 939 Semprons at places like Newegg. You can buy systems with the chips from HP - that's been the case for over 6 months! - but they've never made it to retail. Reply

I had the impression we'd see Retail Socket 939 Semprons around the same time that the big brother Athlon 64 transitions to Socket M2. Socket 939 will become the value socket, and socket 754 will go away, except maybe for mobile applications.

Though that does beg the question of why AMD transitioned the 100-series Opterons to Socket 939, when the Socket M2/Socket F transition is coming soon... what was so wrong with Socket 940 in the interim? Yeah, 940 boards cost more, but if you care enough to buy an Opteron instead of an A64, you won't be quibbling about mainboard cost.

Single socket 940 basically became pointless. Is there anyone out there that wants an Opteron with a single socket motherboard? I don't know about you, but if I were seriously looking at Opteron I'd want two sockets. If you want a single dual-core, you might as well get socket 939. I'm not sure why the San Diego 939 chips are still being called "Opteron" anyway - possibly for marketing purposes?

Regarding Sempron, when we transition to DDR2 and socket M2, there will also be DDR2 and socket M1 for the value lineup. At least, that was my understanding, and I admit I could have that wrong. The odd thing is that S1 and M2 are both dual-channel DDR2 as far as I can tell, but there are more pins on M2 than S1. Riddle me this: how do you still get dual-channel DDR2 but use 750 to 800 pins instead of 940 pins? Again, maybe I'm wrong and S1 is just the mobile variant of M2. Socket F is for servers and workstations (i.e. next gen. Opteron) and has 1207 (1206?) pins, and I'm not sure if that will have more than dual-channel DDR2. I'm figuring multiple FBD channels is an option, but how many? Four, or does FBD just require more pins per channel? Reply

I hadn't heard about either socket S1 or M1 (are there both S1 and M1, or when you mentioned M1 was that a typo?). That makes more sense of course than 939 becoming the value socket... the Intel has moved completely to DDR2, so AMD had best move completely to DDR2 as well. I'm puzzled by your riddle as well... if dual-channel DDR2 can be done in 750-800 pins, then what are the other pins in M2 for? My completely un-informed bet is that M1/S1 is actually single-channel DDR2.
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M1 is a type. Oops. There's socket S1, M2, and F coming out. I screwed up elsewhere as well, as S1 is apparently the mobile version of M2, and pin counts are basically unknown (at least for me). Sad thing is, I even helped write the roadmap update where we http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">discussed this information. Guess I'm getting senile. ;)

Socket 754 and 939 are both transitioning to End of Life by the start of 2007, with both the value and performance platforms moving to M2 (sort of like Intel with socket 775). The mobile market will have a similar shift, only moving to S1 instead. Reply

AMD ought to just kill off 754 now by releasing those Socket-939 Semprons into retail... the lack of low cost Socket-939 CPU's is the only thing that keeps me buying S754 for my customers' office systems; the motherboard cost difference is below $10 in most cases (zero even, depending on chipset choice), and the cost of 2 smaller DIMMs vs. 1 big DIMM is usually a wash. Oh well, AMD's gotta follow the plan I guess.

Thanks for the link back to the AMD roadmap article. I read it at the time, but hey, it's November now and that was in June.

If Sockets M2 and S1 are both dual-channel DDR2, then I guess S1 must be very high-density, and/or has fewer power pins, and/or is otherwise form-factor optimized for thin-and-light applications. I guess if you know you'll never need more than 25W, then you can do away with half or more of the power pins vs. a full size socket that has to cope with upwards of 100 watts.
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